PR!? How did that happen?

Note: Make sure you're enrolled and squared away with the membership this week. If you need help, walk over to the cashiering desk and they'll take care of you. Read: $$$

Weather: Just a reminder, if it rains this week, then we will suspend any outdoor activities, but you'll be able to come inside the Wooden Center or KREC and do your own thing or jump in on IFT. You know the drill.

A few newer people have asked whether we share the workouts and for help with their own workouts. No, we do not make our workouts public. A lot of reasons for that and I'll save you all the boredom of it, but we just don't. You all have journals and you can easily track your own workouts. As far as your own workouts go: I used to put up a workout a week, but they got repetitive and often I find that it's too much for most people, yet they're doing them out of obligation and eating into the next day's training session. So for those that want to do something extra, go for it, you know how to put workouts together by now and a lot of the sessions have groups that meet up on off days to exercise. Just make sure you're listening to your body. If you feel tired and wasted, REST. If you feel like you can fly, go big. Any fluff in between if just a tiresome waste of your time. Go for a pleasant walk instead and call it a day. The key is to enjoy the things you spend your precious time on.


Method, Madness, PR, Why..

Last week we dead lifted. A day that many look forward to and others dread. That day, when all you have to do is grab a bar that weighs a little too much and stand up tall with it, elicits quite a bit of anxiety in most of us. In one sense, you think: what can possibly go wrong; in reality, those that have gone heavy and have experience that deep dark hole where you feel lucky to be alive know the feeling and want to avoid it at all costs. But the glory of the PR (personal record) doesn't come without a price to pay. And that one lift, the one single attempt, is the culmination of weeks upon weeks of invested training, so there's quitea a bit of interest in it.

So everyone went after it. We warmed into the heavy weights and then hit it with all our might. We held on tight to the bar and kept pushing the ground away from it. Our faces tensed up and some even let out a mighty roar (loosely stated). The will was relentless and letting go would mean losing it all and that's just unacceptable. Bam. Finished. You're standing tall and still holding it. You look around and everyone has their jaw dropped. Well done! You PRed. You're feeling quite victorious. As well you should. Progress is no easy task.

A number of people then asked about how that's possible since we don't really dead lift that much. This is a very valid question that we consider during programming but don't really expose much. The concept is called "transferrence". It literaly means transferring skills and strengths to bigger "things". So a lot of little things we do end up stacking together and amalgumating into bigger, more compound strengths and skill sets. Over several weeks, we have many opportunities to develop very useful strengths and skills to then apply into the subsequent workouts. It's like a snowball.

Think about something as simple as jumping. Jumping seems pretty straight-forward, but how does an individual get better at jumping? You could try to overload a jump but if you go too far past your work-capacity, you're just going to tire yourself quicker than usual or snap an achilles tendon. Bad news either way. So, with some smart coaching, you decide to break the jump down into it's parts. Hip extension/leg power; great, let's train it. Power cleans, kettlebell swings, plyo depth drops, jumping lunges, jumping slam ball, push press. Sweet, eay peasy. Wait, how do I get better at those things though? Well, lets' take the clean and kettlebell swing. Those depend very heavily on hip strength and back strength and how quickly you can apply those strengths. So how do we get at those? Well, the squat is always the big daddy king of them all and the dead lift is close behind (but we can't dead lift often because of neurological issues) so let's do more of those. But wait, how do you go about putting a heavier bar on your shoulders? Well pullups, pushups, dips, and pressing will help that. Don't forget about the hand strength needed to even think about holding onto a heavier bar or a kettlebell. Hand-hangs and farmer carries help those. Lets not neglect the massive amounts of midline stability needed for any progressions in structural overload. After all of these things, the most important part of them all is actually having the energy resources and the nutrition to develop and recover. So food and sleep and rest are imperative.

So you see? Jumping is simple, but getting better at it is not. Big deal.. Who cares about jumping, right? Well you might not, but if you're paycheck depends on it, you might. Welcome to athletic strength and conditioning. Developing these progressions and programming them for athletes that need to become faster runners or more powerful jumpers or swimmers or throwers is no easy task. But you see the idea here? We take lots of seemingly unrelated and pointless workloads and transfer the developments into much more focussed and precise movements. Think about why a runner should do pushups, and why a hammer thrower might want to squat 500lbs.

So this is what we do in BHIP. We do lots of different things that all somehow culminate into bigger and broader strengths and skills. This is something to think about when involved in performance-based training, which is what BHIP is. There is always a purpose and a method to the madness, and if you can think about it that way, maybe it will help motivate you. A bicep-curl is fun and all but it's only good for just that, unless you're addressing that weak link in a clean when your legs push and your arms get yanked so hard that you can't hold the bar.

This leads me to address some things I saw in the deadlift. Most people had breakdowns in their hand strength, which is pretty expected since we don't get to hold heavy things all day like our hands were designed to do. The other was core strength. Every dead lift should feel like you just held a plank for like 5 minutes. Once the core breaks down, the spine either rounds backwards or forward into the abdomen. This causes a massive power bleed and the whole structure falls apart under load and the legs give out. The bar falls to the ground and makes a loud crashing sound indicative of failure.

No, situps will not address this issue. The situp develops hip FLEXION. The fact that your abs burn just means you have weak abs, not that you're training them. Dead lifting is about hip EXTENSION. I told everyone long ago to start holding the hollow position and I'll remind you again now. Hollow rocks are the key. Then transfering the hollow strength into other skills will develop the midline strength you need for lifting and running and swimming and sitting upright.

Here's the video again: http://gymnasticswod.com/content/hollow-body
Check out the progressions he shows as well. Ring a bell?

Read this article: http://www.mensjournal.com/laird-hamilton-says-make-yourself-uncomfortable
Good stuff in there. Think about the transference of Laird's training into his sport.

Go do some hollow rocks. Do them till you can't, then do like 50 more.

Enjoy